Dahlem Leadership Academy Open LectureVirtual Teams - What makes them effective and how they can be managedLucy Gilson

University of Connecticut, USA

Speaker: Lucy Gilson, Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty and Outreach at the University of Connecticut School of Business

Moderator: Rudolf Kerschreiter, Director Dahlem Leadership Academy, Professor of Social, Organizational, and Economic Psychology at FU Berlin

Wednesday, September 16 2020, 16:00 - 17:00

The lecture will be held online (registration on our website, see below)

About this Lecture In 2016, the European Political Strategy Centre identified working virtually as one of the most relevant trends in work. This paradigm shift (from face-to-face to virtual) was designed to allow organizations to smooth work-flow across time zones, cut down travel and moving costs, and to take advantage of a global talent pool. In March 2020, almost all work worldwide became virtual, and virtual teams (VT) overnight became ubiquitous. With the speed of this transition, the planning and design traditionally needed to help ensure VTs' success was not available. Now, over six-month later, it looks like VTs are here to stay and it is therefore a good time to discuss what we know about VTs, what makes VTs successful, and how can we help our existing VTs to survive and thrive. In this talk, I start with a brief history of VT research and comment on how this area of inquiry has grown exponentially. In doing so, I will highlight some of the key findings that have remained consistent and some that have changed over the last 25 years. In particular, I will focus on the areas of leadership, planning, member familiarity, and communications media, because in these areas we as leaders can have a direct impact on the success of our VTs. About Lucy Gilson Lucy Gilson (Ph.D. Georgia Institute of Technology) is a Professor and the Associate Dean for Faculty & Outreach at the University of Connecticut School of Business. Her primary research focus is on teams in a di-verse range of organizational settings and jobs to understand how creativity, empowerment, leadership, and virtual communication influence effectiveness. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, as well as many other academic journals and edited books. In 2019, the Web of Science named her a top 1% most cited researcher. She teaches Managing Organizational Change and Leadership at the MBA level and has been recognized as the teacher of the year on several occasions. In addition, she has consulted with many multinational companies as well as state and na-tional agencies in the areas of leadership, women in leadership, leading change and leading for creativity, working in virtual teams, and the importance of mentoring.

Additional Information & registration: www.fu-berlin.de/dla